Why Videogames Should Be Played With Friends, Not Online With Strangers

In the beginning, there were the arcades. We crowded around massive cabinets, seven-foot-tall monoliths containing a single videogame, arrayed like columns in movie theaters and bowling alleys. We would jostle for position, laying down our quarters to reserve a turn. Games were filled with smack talk, and a well-placed fireball could draw cheers.

Gaming was in many ways a social endeavor, something that continued as we bought consoles like the Atari 2600 and Nintendo NES. There were two controllers, which let us play with a friend. Then came the Nintendo 64 in 1996, giving us four standard controller ports. It ushered in a new era of offline social gaming; most designers included four-player modes in their N64 games. GoldenEye 007 became a new religion, and its devotees moved on to the Xbox and Halo, which let us link four consoles for epic 16-player matches.

But just as soon as these social gatherings were becoming the next big thing, game consoles adopted an innovation that would all but kill them: Internet play. Suddenly we were playing together alone.

“It was just easier to monetize online games,” said game designer Douglas Wilson. “You could be alone — you didn’t have to bring a bunch of people over to enjoy it. Companies were getting bigger, and they had to be more conservative.”

As netplay increased in popularity, IRL gamer nights died. Wilson wants to bring them back. He’s the co-founder of Die Gute Fabrik, an indie game studio in Copenhagen that recently released the Kickstarter-funded game Sportsfriends. It’s a collection of offline multiplayer games for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

“A lot of my best gaming memories are all on the couch with friends, or playing in front of a big crowd at a party, and cheering and all that stuff,” said Wilson. “It’s about the whole social context around the occasion — the ritual of play.”

The collection’s flagship title is Johann Sebastian Joust, developed by Wilson. Its design gets players to interact with each other, not the screen. It pits as many as seven players in a dance-like competition of balance, movement, and reflexes. Each player holds a PlayStation motion controller with extreme delicacy, like an egg balanced on a spoon. The objective: Jostle your opponents’ controllers while keeping yours steady. Last one standing wins.

E3 attendees play a rousing round of Johann Sebastian Joust at the IndieCade showcase in 2013. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

The kicker is the classical music in the background. The slightest burst of movement can knock you out of the game, but the music periodically speeds up, signaling a brief period in which the controllers are less sensitive. A direct jostle still knocks someone out, but players have greater freedom to move quickly or reach out with a quick jab.

“Inevitably, if you play Joust long enough, someone breaks the rules,” says Max Temkin, creator of the smash hit card game Cards Against Humanity. Things happen in real life that can’t be replicated in code. “Like, someone throws a chair at someone else. And they’re rewarded, because they win.

“There’s a lot to learn about life from that kind of game,” he says.

The games in Sportsfriends promote this pre-Internet ideal of local play and social camaraderie, but they’re not the only ones doing so. We’ve seen a wave of games meant to be played together—truly together. These games wouldn’t work online, even if you wanted them to. They appeal to players and spectators alike. And it’s just the beginning.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Walking into a Wild Rumpus party is like stepping into a dance club in an arcade. Neon lights flash and spin, a DJ pumps out electronic music at eardrum-busting volume, and everyone’s got a drink. The difference is the indie videogames throughout the room, projected on walls, each with a cluster of revelers.

Robin Baumgarten via Wild Rumpus

Wild Rumpus, based in London, spotlights the social and physical aspects of local multiplayer games by throwing huge parties around them. Since 2011, they’ve hosted events in London, Toronto and this one in San Francisco, one night in March after the Game Developers Conference.

To the side of the dance floor, a crowd watched as two people squared off in Nidhogg, a blend of fencing and tug-of-war with an Atari aesthetic. Behind them, partygoers used fur-covered controllers to portray body-building felines in MuscleCat Showdown. Upstairs, they slid into sleeping bags and writhed on the floor to control their apple-chomping avatars in a game of Roflpillar.

Events like Wild Rumpus are bringing back the feel of the arcade, says event cofounder Marie Foulston. They’re “creating spaces for people to come into games, people that haven’t come into physical spaces and engaged with games before.”

“For me, it was about finding the right sort of games that work in that space, games that worked together instead of playing in isolation,” said Foulston. “When we started out, we wondered if we could sustain running more events, since we didn’t want to drop the quality of the games we curate. But it feels almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since there’s been… so many other events that are showcasing games in physical spaces, there’s many more spaces for people to create these games for. I think that in turn has encouraged people to create more of these games.”

Foulston says many people tell her that they had a great time. But when she asks them what game they liked most, many give a surprising answer: They hadn’t played any. They were happy enough spectating.

“It’s about creating a sporting environment,” Foulston said. “You need games that an audience can get into.”

The UCLA Gamelab Arcade Backpack is shown around during a recent Wild Rumpus party in San Francisco. Robin Baumgarten via Wild Rumpus

There’s also an effort to level the playing field. New four-player, local fighting games like Towerfall and Samurai Gunn are much simpler, in a good way, than genre mainstays like Street Fighter. You can learn the games’ mechanics in seconds; from there, it’s just strategy

“They all have one-hit kills,” says TowerFall creator Matt Thorson: Get hit one time and you’re dead. “It distills it down to the most tense moments of the match.”

One-hit kills, in which the outcome rests on a split-second twitch, is another reason these games are suited for local play. The best Internet connections have a ping of around 10 or 20 milliseconds. It might not seem like much, but it’s everything in a game of one-hit kills.

Games designed to be played online compensate for latency or bad ping, calculating after the fact whether or not a shot hit its target—but it means subjecting the game’s entire design to those concessions.

It’s tough telling players used to Xbox Live that they can’t play your game online. The inability to play online was the most common feedback the creators of TowerFall and Samurai Gunn received. Thorson deliberated for months on whether to include online play in TowerFall, ultimately deciding against it when he imagined someone’s experience the first time they played the game.

“I think most people would play it online first, since it’s harder to get people [to visit],” Thorson said. “So they’re playing online against complete strangers who are probably way better than them, and who either don’t care about them at all, or actively hate them.

“Imagining that being someone’s first TowerFall experience just makes me cringe, and I really couldn’t get past that.”

Trojan Horse

One of the biggest challenges facing developers of local multiplayer games is hardware. Most people playing single-player or online multiplayer games can get by with the controller included with the console. They might have a second one. But who has four? Especially when an Atari 2600 joystick costs $9.95 and a Dual Shock 4 for PS4 costs $60.

For this reason, Wilson doesn’t see TowerFall, Samurai Gunn, or Nidhogg as competition to Johann Sebastian Joust. He sees them as allies. They’re all fighting the same hardware battle, and if someone buys controllers for one game, they have the controllers needed to play another.

“It’s not a zero-sum game,” Wilson said. “The battle is ‘do people have enough hardware to enjoy these games?’ And, like board games, are people in the habit of inviting people over on Friday nights to play?”

Max Temkin thinks that’s an apt comparison. “People are constantly connected to everyone in their life, but they’re also constantly lonely,” he says. Through his company Maxistentialism, Temkin has invested some of his Cards Against Humanity earnings into publishing local multiplayer games, starting with Samurai Gunn.

“There’s something super addictive and super satisfying about just sitting down with your friends and having that real-world experience,” he says. “I think a lot of the times people play Cards, they have this great time and they often attribute it to the game, but it’s really just that the game was the pretext for them to sit down and have this real world interaction.”

Wilson hopes Sportsfriends will similarly act as a “Trojan horse” that gets gamers back into the living room, socializing in person, recapturing the magic of the offline games he played in his youth.